Antonio Roberts

Throughout 2019 - 2020 I worked with eight of Barbican's Young Creatives to create work that responds to Barbican's 2019 season, Life Rewired: What does it mean to be human? Can technology be used to replicate the pheromone communication of ant colonies? Can we use technology to mimic the camouflage abilities of chameleons? Can movement be used as a language, similar to the waggle dance of honey bees? Inspired by Life Rewired, a collection of young creatives from Barbican Young Creatives and BA Performance and Creative Enterprise will respond to these questions to explore what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.

We Are Your Friends takes a critical look at brands and corporations that culture jack memes and internet culture in order to manipulate us into buying into their brand or product. We Are Your Friends was created for a solo exhibition at Czurles Nelson Gallery at Buffalo State University.

At a very young age we (and our parents) are bombarded with images of cute and adorable cartoon characters, with each story aiming to fill our young, innocent minds with wonder, promote healthy friendships, and encourage creativity. These stories would transport us into a fantasy world where anything was possible and nothing was what it seemed. As I grew older I began to learn that behind this imagery were very large corporations who have financial gain at their heart. The ideals that they promote come at a (financial) cost. Furthermore, they will actively halt anyone from using or taking inspiration from these images. Those images which early in life inspire us and promote creativity, in the future hinder it and actively stop it. Sticker Book was commissioned by Dr Rachel Marsden for the Wonder exhibition at The Herbert.

Visually Similar is a video work that examines how images and videos posted online can be used to preserve history, but can also be remixed to create new narratives. In sharing our work online we make a permanent record of a point in time, which can then be used out of context. Commissioned by V&A for V&A Friday Late - Copy / Paste Visually Similar uses 3D models made by Scan the World for The Victoria and Albert Museum.

Barbican young creatives, along with artist and curator Antonio Roberts, present a collection of work in response to Basquiat: Boom for Real Artist and curator Antonio Roberts worked with a group of Barbican young creatives over three months to create artwork in response to the exhibition Basquiat: Boom for Real currently showing in the Barbican Art Gallery. Over the course of four sessions the group examined artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s explosive creativity and imagined the techniques and methods he might use if he was still creating art today. The resulting animations combine more traditional methods of creation such as photography and collage, with more experimental practices such as glitch art, digital collages, animated gifs and projections. Each animated selfportrait reflects the identity of the artist who created it. Artists:

• Max Baraitser Smith
• Isabella Barbaro
• Alex Cole
• Hector Dyer
• Antonio Roberts

New work commissioned for Green Man Festival. Photos by Anna Arca and Max Miechowski.

No Copyright Infringement Intended is a group exhibition, taking place at Phoenix in Leicester and Vivid Projects in Birmingham, that explores the relationship between copyright and culture in the digital age, investigating how the concept of ownership and authorship is evolving and coming into conflict with outdated copyright and intellectual property laws. Featuring 10 national and international artists working across a range of creative practices, the exhibition highlights the ongoing tension between production and copyright, considers the new artistic, social and political possibilities created through this tension and suggests new ways forward for artists, rights holders and the wider creative community. The exhibition features work by Nick Briz, Emilie Gervais, Nicolas Maigret, Christopher Meerdo, Jan Nikolai Nelles & Nora Al-Badri, Duncan Poulton, Fernando Sosa, Andrea Wallace & Ronan Deazley. Photos by Pamela Raith, Stephen Lynch, and Chole Minton

Unauthorised Copy highlights issues surrounding Copyright and presents works where creativity and the complex copyright laws have clashed. Technological innovations starting with the printing press and more recently computers and the internet have made duplicating, sharing, copying and remixing art and culture an easier and faster process. Conflicting opinions on the merits and dangers of this are leading to a permission culture where creativity is hindered. The works presented assert that these processes are central to creativity and innovation and should be encouraged, not obstructed. Exposed brings to forefront the creative ways in which technology is being used to expose minute details of our lives and collect data about our on and offline movements. The supposed benefit of this intrusion into our lives is to combat illegal activities and fill our lives with richer, more relevant cultural experiences. The works presented assert that this comes at a cost of our privacy and safety. These works were commissioned by Aly Grimes for Short Circuit.

Video short I made for the MTV International Rebrand, 2016. Video by me, sound by Manuel Pinto

Curated by Hannah Pierce, Jerwood Encounters: Common Property seeks to demonstrate how artists engage with and relate to copyright through the work of six emerging and mid-career artists, including three new commissions. The exhibition and accompanying events programme seeks to generate new conversations about how copyright is currently impacting the way visual artists make and distribute their work, and demonstrates how artists are challenging the limitations of copyright through their practice. Photos by Hydar Dewachi

A two-part solo exhibition that took place at Birmingham Open Media from 23rd October 2015 to 23rd January 2016 and University of Birmingham from 2nd March - 30th May 2016. The exhibition featured a new body of digital, video, print and installation pieces developed as part of my residency at the University of Birmingham's Research and Cultural Collections and Fellowship at Birmingham Open Media. The pieces explore ideas of ownership, copyright and free culture - issues which are pertinent as online communities become more prolific and harder to police. Over the course of the exhibition a number of events took place that invited artists and the public to rethink ideas surrounding ownership and authorship in the digital age. Permission Taken was supported through public funding by Arts Council and with funding from University of Birmingham.

Stealth presents recent work by UK and international artists critiquing surveillance culture and the invasive and pervasive technologies that shape our daily interactions. Utilising a variety of media including installations, video, social media and software, the exhibition explores how technology affects and disrupts our perceptions of privacy. Artists: Manu Luksch, Sang Mun, Henry Driver, James Bridle, Joseph DeLappe, Ryan Hughes.

Music video for Light Under The Door by My Panda Shall Fly.

New worked commissioned by Tate Britain for Loud Tate 2014

"Ways of Something", is a contemporary remake of John Berger’s BBC documentary, "Ways of Seeing" (1972). Commissioned by The One Minutes, at the Sandberg institute in Amsterdam and compiled by Lorna Mills, the project consists of one-minute videos by fifty eight web-based artists who commonly work with 3D rendering, gifs, film remix, webcam performances, and websites to describe the cacophonous conditions of artmaking after the internet.

In early 2012 I made a music compilation that attempted to summarise my musical tastes on a 700MB/80 minute CD. In order to share this I decided to reinterpret the songs as images. The images were made by reading the audio files into Pure Data as binary data and then saving them as jpgs.

For a week in October 2010 the first GLI.TC/H event took place at venues across Chicago, IL. The event was one of the first of its kind to celebrate glitch art and and saw the coming together of glitch artists from around the world to experience gallery installations, performances and film screenings. In 2011 the event expanded to also include Amsterdam, NL and Birmingham. With support from Arts Council England, Birmingham City University, VIVID and fizzPOP I curated the Birmingham event on November 19th 2011. The event included workshops, presentations, film screenings and performances by artists from national and international artists.

Inspired by Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room piece I have taken Dataface one step further. In glitch art we only ever see result of the process of damaging an image, video or sound. Rarely can we observe this process as it happens within the computer in an instant. Using Alvin Lucier's 1969 piece I Am Sitting in a Room as inspiration, in this piece I show the many steps taken to damage data to the point where it loses all meaning. Font files are files that attribute a style to the otherwise plain text that we see on screen. The computer treats this only as an attribute of the text and can understand it regardless of what font file is used or how it looks to the viewer. In this piece I have used a script, created in collaboration with G Bulmer, that explores the font file and damages it by randomising the values that construct each glyph. The computer, doing only what it has been instructed to do, continually attacks the font files' data to the point where it is sometimes corrupted and not even it can interpret it correctly. The resulting video shows the gradual damaging of the data. The viewer will struggle to find meaning amongst the visual noise whilst the computer still understands it. The full text reads:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I have typed out this text using a font called Dataface and I am going to randomise parts of the font file's code and save the results of it again and again, until it's appearance becomes illegible and the font file is destroyed. What you will see, then, are the effects of randomisation, with the occasional glitch that occurs when the font file is so badly damaged that the computer is unable to read it. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of my ability to edit fonts but more a way to eliminate all meaning that this text might have.